The 3–5 grade youth have been making an outdoor classroom meeting place and Caterpillar Garden. We began with an area where trees were removed for Follen’s renovation to make room for construction equipment and fill that had become overgrown with invasive plants and tree seedlings in hard-packed ground.

If you walk up from the parking lot, you can see a circle of sticks where the youth are pulling maple seedlings to make a play area, as well as a circle of leftover tiles where a small garden of native plants that feed caterpillars were planted. Adults have removed poison ivy and prickery things prior to the youth working. Our hope is to support the Pollinator garden begun at Sacred Heart Church with our own native plant garden to give caterpillars and insects the foods they have evolved to eat, and in this way encourage birds to use the space to eat their fill of healthy food.

Both the caterpillar garden and the outdoor classroom are a work in progress. Watch them evolve.